Civil Liberties

C-SPAN videotaped Tuesday’s oral argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v. Clapper, one of the primary challenges to the Section 215 telephony…

The headline won’t surprise those who have been following the surveillance reform debate. But on August 19, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Leahy sent a letter to Attorney…

Citing the threat posed by the “creation of an Islamic Caliphate in Iraq and Syria and the Islamist-extremist export of terrorism on which it is based,” UK Prime Minister David…

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court declassified an opinion today which, although highly redacted, illuminates the way at least one Judge is interpreting his mandate to…

Over at Politico, Josh Gerstein reports that the Obama administration has broken its self-imposed suspension of transfers to Yemen and sent two long-term detainees from U.S. military…

Does the NSA minimize Americans metadata? Today’s reporting by the Intercept calls into question whether the NSA minimizes so-called metadata relating to Americans’ digital…

Some commentators have suggested that the newly disclosed special forces operation to rescue James Foley may have lacked congressional authorization, thereby further underscoring…

In a world of electronic surveillance and secret searches, notice is more essential than ever. Notice allows criminal defendants to test whether the government’s evidence was,…

Over at Lawfare, Jack Goldsmith appears to suggest that President Obama’s decision to authorize limited uses of force in Iraq underscores the need for an open-ended congressional…

Whatever one thinks of the Senate version of the USA FREEDOM Act–which offers a series of substantive and procedural reforms to U.S. surveillance programs–it is now…

I’ve written before about the potential significance of the Guantánamo “counsel access” case—Hatim v. Obama–which raised the question of whether…

I’ve published a couple of posts here tracking some of the more important recent developments respecting Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.  This post is an…